


sand and lightning, smoke and glass [A Paradox fic, or a Sherlock fic squared]

by Cottia



Series: Wordstrings!Verse Fic [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock (Wordstrings!Verse)
Genre: Gen, Maybe - Freeform, POV inside a miserable agitated head, POV of being unable to filter out detail, SI, SI triggers, brief self-loathing use of un-PC terms, earworms, it'll be all-rightish in the end I swear, underlying feeling of suicidality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 09:28:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cottia/pseuds/Cottia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sherlock's hard drive needs rebooting. Again. In which we see many, many run-on sentences, and exploit basic text formatting options like we're reading about Sherlock's [blue] House. Which (in a way) we are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sand and lightning, smoke and glass [A Paradox fic, or a Sherlock fic squared]

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: POV from inside a miserable, agitated head, POV of not being able to filter out extraneous detail, possible triggers for SI (self-injury), fantasies of implausible but nevertheless graphic SI which would in practice pretty much lead to death, underlying feeling of suicidality, brief self-loathing use of un-PC terms, earworms. But it'll be all right(ish) in the end, I swear.

  
Sherlock has been lying on the sofa for the past 35 hours.

There's nothing particularly unusual about this; it is, after all, his favourite place to think.  What  _is_ unusual is that he can’t have slept for more than three hours in almost as many days, and his brain is starting to make ominous grinding noises.

Myths among the Metropolitan Police notwithstanding, Sherlock does require sleep.  It's a weakness he once foolishly hoped he could give up - still hopes, if he’s honest with himself.  John’s eyelids flicker in mesmerising patterns on the rare nights his dreams don’t turn to blood and dust and haze and screaming, and John’s eyelashes are frankly  _entrancing_ , and ordinarily Sherlock would never choose sleep over memorising such things.  But right now there is black smog prickling at the edges of his eyes, and a swarm of half-formed thoughts buzzing around his head, and he can’t remember withdrawal from any drug being quite as bad as this.

_‘And you're taking your irritation out on John,_ ’ says a quiet steady voice from somewhere between his limbic system and his frontal lobe.

_Ah_ , Sherlock replies.   _Haven't seen_ you _in a while.  I wondered where you'd got to._

Sherlock considers the appearance of the Voice to be the first sign that things are about to turn Not At All Good.  He’s been generally irritated at Life as far back as he can remember, and his head’s been full of the static of a badly tuned radio since before he hit puberty, but these are things he can usually ignore or overcome.  The Voice, though, is steady and sure and quiet - rather like John, now that he thinks about it - and tells him things with such earth-shattering finality that it's  _blinding_ , he’s discombobulated with the shock of it all, and then the hard drive whirrs and the motherboard heats up and his mind starts frantically analysing the new information that deep down, he realises he should have known already.

_‘_ _That's because I'm your best friend’_ , says the voice smugly.  ‘ _I tell you the truth, no matter how much it hurts.  That's what best friends_  do.’

Sherlock estimates he has three days of this.  Three days of arguing, until he gets too exhausted to fight and just lets it lecture him constantly, a half-day after that before he believes the Voice over everything else.

_‘_ _He's too nice and he's wired wrong himself, you said so, you know so, you took something beautiful that Afghanistan had bent all out of shape and_ experimented _on it, tried to shatter him into a million pieces and rebuild him for your own_   _selfish reasons like the toys you just_ had  _to take apart to see how they worked, pretended it was_ charitable _, if he'd got a decent therapist he could have been better by now but no, you had to keep him, and he's too nice to realise or to admit it if you showed him.  You warned him and he still didn't run, that was the sign that he was wired too wrong and too nice and far, far too good and you should have known better, should have got him out of the flat, should have left -_ _'_

_No.  Shut up, you're ruining everything.  He was miserable before, he told me so, he’s happier with me.  Leave me alone.  Stop talking about him, how dare you talk about him?  Get out of my head._

_‘_ _He only_ thinks _he's happy, and only because he doesn't know any better.  You won't_ let _him know any better.  You could have told him the limp was psychosomatic and then_ left _, that's what any decent person would have done, not insinuated yourself into every corner of his life so he can't leave, just because you're too selfish to think you can live without him -_ _'_

Sherlock rolls furiously into the foetal position just as John opens the door, curling into a physical shield against the silent shrieking.  John casts a brief look over at the angry snarl of dressing-gown on the sofa, sighs, and then Sherlock can hear polythene bags rustling further away and the sounds of shopping being unpacked in the kitchen.

_‘_ _Hear him sighing?_ _’_  the voice whispers on.   _‘_ _He should hate you.  He probably does -- after all, he's just got the shopping even though he looks exhausted, he's got a job and what have you done, what the_ fuck _have you been doing apart from lying on the sofa for three fucking days..._ _’_

He wonders whether this sort of business is what drives a considerable percentage of the British populace to drink themselves into a stupor every Saturday night, whether evil truths howl and gibber at them too.  He’s never understood the appeal of depressant drugs for the rest of the world – who are quite dull enough without pharmaceutical help – but if the racket in his head is nothing particularly unusual, the popularity of distasteful necessities like heroin, diazepam, amytal and zopiclone would at least make some sort of sense.   _Surely not_ , he thinks.   _They have jobs, habits, mundane commitments they somehow manage to meet every day.  Surely they don't do all that with this_ sound _going on?_

_'_ _Maybe they do.  Maybe they do, and you're just incredibly lazy when it comes to anything that doesn't directly benefit you._ _'_

He feels he ought to muster some sort of defence, if only for the principle of the thing -  _No.  I got John a new phone.  Last week.  It took me ages to find one that he could use, he's useless with computers.  That wasn't lazy.  Go away, I'm trying to sleep, I can't sleep with you talking on and on at me._

_'_ _You wanted to make sure you could always find him, control him, and you've never liked that he used the phone that Harry gave him, you’ve always hated the reminder that he might love something in the world apart from you - don't pretend that didn't benefit you, you can't stand that you don't own him entirely, that he could walk out whenever he wanted to, whenever he saw sense - and he will, you know he will, it's a wonder he hasn't already -_ _'_

A dull  _clunk_  as a mug is deposited on the coffee table, and the creak of old leather as John sits heavily on the unoccupied side of the sofa.

'Look,' John says.  'I've had a crap day.  Six patients convinced antibiotics would help a cold. And a teenager - just a kid really, Christ - skipping her insulin, risking going blind.  I'm wrung out.  But by the look of you, I'd say you've had a worse day than me.  So.'

Sherlock is still staring savagely at the wall.  John stands up, and sighs.  'I'm going out.  I'll be back around sevenish, yeah?  Hopefully I'll be in less of a vile mood by then, and then we can talk.  And eat, because you bloody well need to.'

His hand hovers lightly over Sherlock’s shoulder.

'There's a tea on the table.  Try not to beat yourself up too much while I'm out?  I love you, you know.'  The floor creaks, the door clicks, and he is gone. 

_________________________________

 

 

'Stop  _saying_  that,' he snarls.

Thoughts swirl up from the vortex at the base of his skull, and so many that he can't breathe or think or even hear them any more, they've just turned into whirling and static and under it all the Voice, taunting and threatening - not threatening, no, merely stating cold hard fact, and there's no room in his head for coherent thought.  Just noise, too much noise to think, like when there was the MRI so Sherlock could see John's brain glowing at precisely the moment of orgasm, but there was too much noise from the scanner, the banging, building up and up like so much useless information, clutter in his head like nursery rhymes, like the supermarket, and why  _are_  there so many kinds of everything, he resents it, the infinitesimal possibilities of washing powder and eggs and coffee, as if it made any difference in the end what one chose as long as one chose  _something_.  Too many choices, and Sherlock doesn't see how people don't realise, how they even remember what they're choosing, how the choices don't all blur into a garish pointillist morass, how all the utterly useless, utterly inane sounds that people make with their feet and their hands and their dull, ordinary conversations coming out of dull, ordinary mouths don't drive them  _insane_ , how somehow for them all the different noises don't collapse and coalesce into a constant roar that drills into his brain until every tiny rustle  _hurts_ , until the whiteness spreads itself over his ears and his eyes and he can't see anything at all.

At least in the supermarket he can close his eyes.  He can centre himself on his nails digging into the palms of his hands, on the weight of his coat swinging heavy against his thighs, bury himself in the sound of John's voice.  This time the noise is inescapable, it’s inside his head - ill-made ideas streaming out of him and building up inside his head like cotton wool clogging his thoughts, the swarm pressing so tight that maybe it's cold fusion, all the thoughts pressed tight together until they go quiet and still and feed the Voice hissing at him like a ticking clock in silence or a worm in bread. 

Let them out, he thinks, maybe trepanning would work, drill a hole, make a safety valve, but he doesn't have a drill and anyway that would be noisy, and more noise from the outside added to the _clickclickkaddunkchirpsquealclickclunk_  he has already, that wouldn’t help. Besides, thoughts leaving his brain wouldn't just disappear, they'd still be noise, squirming out of the neat circle at his temple like maggots leaving a week-old corpse, changing into blowflies to crowd his eyes, swirling in the air in white print  _sans serif_ , settling over the flat as a dusty jumble of letters three inches thick, John would have to brush them away when he came home, and he might breathe some of Sherlock’s thoughts and choke on the mess, and they're not good thoughts, they're nasty, wouldn't be clean white at all, would be dark visceral burgundy and slick puce and most of all too bright and all clashing, which would hurt John's eyes, so of course the drill is a bad idea. 

Wrong, completely wrong, and yet maybe right, maybe if he went out somewhere on his own, on the Heath with a drill, no, a knife, cut them all out from where they're writhing under his skin, let them fly out and disappear into the thick, still air of a London summer night, would that make everything go quiet?  And if he lost too much blood cutting them out John would find him, and John has the same blood as him only better, John's blood can turn off songs so maybe it can turn off thoughts too, so maybe if John found him he could have some of John's blood and it would run through him and clean all the sludge out of his veins, all the fragments of songs and beginnings of ideas and remembered sounds and smashed photos busily clotting all through him.

_'_ _You can't steal someone else's blood_ , _’_  says the Voice.   _'Sociopath.  Selfish.   All you do is take, suck all the goodness from him.  You'll ruin him, you know.  You've invaded him._ _'_

This raises a vague, distant memory of John laughing at him, very long ago it seems now – it must have been years ago because at the time he was supposing himself to be happy.  John, saying he couldn't be a sociopath, because then he wouldn't feel guilty about anything.  Sherlock, privately thinking that it wasn't that he didn't feel guilty, it was that he only felt guilty about how guilty he should have felt but wasn't, usually, and how it was entirely possible that someone sufficiently high-functioning could be immune to the emotional ramifications of ignoring specific instances of immorality while still understanding the general concept.

_'_ _Yep.  Good point, that.  Should have known you'd be good enough of a sociopath to even fake_ guilt _._ ’ 

_this is worse, this is a thousand times worse, there are no words for much worse this is than the Voice itself please go back to the first Voice make it stop shut up shut up shut up please please shut up_

_‘_ _You even almost managed to convince_ yourself _you were capable of being anything other than selfish.  Bloody hell.  You're a marvel, you really are._ _’_

You  _bastard_ , thinks Sherlock, shaking with horror.  You've taken his voice, you've no right to do that, give it  _back_  -

_'_ _I'm only saying what he'll say.  What he's thinking.  Wouldn’t you rather hear it from me, a warning safe inside your head?  I could leave you now, but that won’t stop him realising one day soon.  He’ll see how you’ve ruined him, and he’ll hate you for it.  Is that really what you want?  I can't believe you - Christ.  I don't understand you, I really don't._ _’_

He can't argue - there's nothing else in his head now, nothing but the dull crackling roar of a waterfall.  Can't fight, not with John speaking softly, sadly, not even angry, just quietly shocked and disappointed - not even disappointed in Sherlock, but in  _himself_.  For not knowing better, for loving the sociopath, the freak, the one person half of London warned him against, for thinking he’d be safe when all Sherlock’s ever done is  _take_.

Sherlock burrows into his memories, trying to find some kind of shield, something to  _focus_  on for fuck's sake, wishing he hadn't already analysed to death every stain on the ceiling and every scuff in the rug, rummages for a detail he missed in a case he never solved, a sticker on the backpack of some tourist on the Tube that he never adequately explained, a list to recite that he doesn't already know backwards - not the Knowledge for Central London, he knows that a little too well for it to keep him busy, and he suspects the Knowledge for Greater London is slightly too much for him in his current state.  Brands of microwave.  Brands of coat.  Brands of watch.  Brands of cigarette.  Brands of soap.  He begins to count off lines of designer shoe on his fingers, beginning the litany of colours and scuff marks and footprints.

Four notes ascending.  Two words, twice.   **(Il court il court)**.  No.  He finishes the Louboutins and goes on to Kurt Geiger.  Algarve, Alan, KG, Halston, Whitney, Wasabi -  **(Il court il court le furet le furet du bois mesdames)**  –  _No_.  Halston, Whitney, Wasabi, William -  **(il repassera par-là)**

Fuck.   _Fuck_.  Sherlock resents these, the jingles that refuse to leave his brain when their usefulness is long gone, the things he learned before he'd learnt to delete things, to decide which things he wanted permanently locked in his brain and which things he definitely, definitely didn't, the things he let slip into his head before he knew better and now can't erase.   **(Il a passé par ici, il repassera par-là)**  sings the memory of a rainy childhood summer in in a crumbling house outside Besançon, and it's a  _stupid_  little song and Sherlock loathes it, he's always loathed it, it's musically unsatisfying and the words are utterly  _dull_  and worst of all it doesn't  _end_ , one of those stupid bloody little songs that loops back on itself so Sherlock can never escape it, never get out of the loop once he's begun, he'd smash it if it weren't too small to smash already, though smashing it would only make it even worse, playing out of order, asking

**(what is the pretty wood wood ferret my ladies he will be back is he the ferret this way he went my ladies is he runs the ferret the matter he runs the wood is he wood ladies what ladies here there where he will be back pretty wood he went the wood of the ferret he went there here what is the matter ferret matter he went what does it matter)**

He wonders wildly if he should think of John, if he has observed well enough that he could count the hairs on John's head without John actually having to be there, but - no.  He doesn't deserve to think of John.  Doesn't deserve it, and anyway, the Voice would come back, and that's more than Sherlock can stand.  He starts grimly afresh, this time on common perfumes and aftershaves, ticking them off on his fingertips.  It's not much, but it takes the edge off, keeps a tiny part of his head clear, pushes the swarms of sound and sight and touch and smell to the back of his head, though all the while the ferret runs  **(in the wood my ladies)**  and the Voice whispers on  **(what is he in the wood there in the wood what is he)** – 

_________________________________

 

   
Almost an hour later, John opens the door.  Sherlock is still on the sofa, sitting hunched, muttering about all the different smells of shampoo, counting off on his knuckles in a feverish rosary.

_'Christ,'_  sighs John, or is it the Voice? –  _‘_ _What a nutter, chanting apple-blueberry-peach-mango-raspberry I don't know why I bother’_  - 'Right.  If there's any left of that tea I made you, it'll be cold.  Let me fix that first, and then we can have a shot at everything else.'

_his fingers are white_ **(qu'est-ce qu'il y a)** _he must be cold_ –  _‘_ _Jesus, you bastard, couldn't you have helped?_ _’_  - pear, Imperial Leather, spearmint, peppermint -  **(il a passé par ici)**   _could have made him tea_   _could have should have_  –   _‘_ _It's more than your turn, you know_   **(il repassera)**   _after all, you know_ ’ - peppermint, coal tar, jojoba, no, ginseng, coal tar, ginseng, cinnamon…

His fingers are gently untwisted and wrapped around the biggest of all the mugs in the kitchen, the one from the British Library proclaiming “ _You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me._ ”, and Sherlock doesn't deserve to be holding a huge steaming mug of tea, because it's from John, and John is the only warm thing in the world and so the tea is a little more of his warmth that he shouldn't have given away to a sociopath.  But his fingers tighten reflexively, and he fancies that by burning his fingers he can do penance for the theft.

John sits on the sofa beside him looking at him with sad eyes, and he is infinitely better and warmer than the tea, and Sherlock isn't allowed to touch him.  And the smell of John under the smell of the Park and a trace of the grime of the Tube, this hurts like battery acid.  Because he knows that very soon John will leave him and he will have video, he supposes, but even if it were possible to synthesise something out of salt and mulled wine and gunpowder, it could never be exact enough, and so one day he won't remember what John smells like any more.

'Okay.  Like the whiteness, yes?  Go ahead, I'm listening.'

No, not like the whiteness, and although John's leaving anyway, Sherlock needs to throw the madman (the other madman) out of his head, make him run like hell rather than pack up slowly.  'It's nothing like the whiteness, you understood the whiteness, do keep up.  If it were the whiteness I'd have got people to shoot at us by now, I wouldn't be here like a coat on a hatstand.'

'No,' says John, and  _he's smiling how can he be smiling_ , 'I meant it's like the whiteness, you tell me what you can and I'll try to fix English if you need me to.  Go on.'

Sherlock thinks.  The whiteness was hard enough to explain, he thinks, but then he tried and it turned out John understood, or at least understood enough for it to be all right and for there to be kissing, which Sherlock vaguely remembers enjoying at the time.  At least, it was with John, and if he could have ever enjoyed anything it would have involved John, John or the violin, so that at least makes sense.

But the whiteness isn’t a failing, it’s not nasty and vicious like the rest of him, like this.  This is from the part of his brain that is so very Not Fine, the bit that John should never see, the bubbling tarpit where the Other List lives.  He can't say any of this, and he can't say how he knows already that soon John will leave, because John will deny it and he won't be able to bear that John won't know the truth or won't say.  And -  _selfish_ , he reminds himself - he doesn't want to make John leave.  Not right now.  Just a little longer.

John closes his eyes.  'You think you can't tell me, don't you?  Look, just - I know you have a bad habit of thinking you're completely vile, but -' He takes a breath, runs a hand through his hair.  'You...really hate yourself right now, don't you?  Think you're irredeemable?'

The only thing Sherlock’s looked at since sitting up is a particularly deep burn in the coffee table, but somehow he's able to avoid John's eyes even more pointedly than before.   _I_ am _, why don't you_ see _?,_ he thinks despairingly.

John grimaces.  'All right.  What else is there?  What's it like in in your head?'

Sherlock rolls his eyes and flops sideways to curl up again, his head slowly filling with all the Things Not to Be Said.  John gets up and sits on his heels by the sofa, his hand moving to pet dark curls until Sherlock flinches away.  'Don't.  Stop it.  You taste  _awful_.'

'Okay, okay, I won't.  Er.  What?'

'You taste of hand sanitiser.  Not with my mouth, with my hair.  Stop it.  Don't touch me, it's awful.'

John removes his hand, which is good and what Sherlock wanted, except that now John is not touching him anymore, which is bad and very, very cold.  All he has is the tea, the hot ceramic burning into his breastbone, his eyes wet from steam and exhaustion.  John reaches back for his own mug, takes a sip, steadies himself on the arm of the sofa.

'Just talk.  Slow as you like, I'm here, I've got you.'

_Not for long_ , thinks Sherlock.

And then:

_I want to rip down the curtains and burn them._

_I'd go stand on the Heath and pull my skin off in long ribbons like stripping wallpaper if it meant I could have your blood to turn off mine._

_I wanted to smash every window in the flat while you were out ~~,~~ ; I would have done, except it meant you would have been cold when you got back._

_If the thoughts get out of me, don't breathe them, get out as fast as you can, don't catch my thoughts.  Don't let me invade you._

_I never make you tea._

_You're going to leave, really leave this time, but still I can't stand to remind you._

_I'm just a sociopath who likes to think about dying._

_You smell grey right now, and if you leave I won't ever remember how you're meant to smell._

_It's like channel-hopping while the signal keeps going._

_It's like scrubbing out my skull with steel wool._  
 

'It's -' begins Sherlock, and then he stops.  He won't tell John to leave, which is selfish but what difference will a few more hours make, he can tell him in a few hours.  And he can't say all the things he’s thinking which are Not Fine, John can't know those.  But he can describe the feeling.

'Like Harrods.  It's like Harrods, all the colours in the washing machine.  Only under my eyelids.'

John frowns.  Sherlock can see him running through all the possible meanings, and discarding them, and  _none of them are right, why is this so hard_?  _He hated Harrods, he told me, when he went to buy my Christmas present, it’s perfectly obvious what I mean._

‘You went to buy my Christmas present and you hated it, too many colours and noises, but you don't mind Harrods outside of Christmas, you’ve been there at other times and didn't mind at all, quite enjoyed it in fact.'

John sits back.  'I...I  _think_  I'm beginning to get it.  Keep talking, though.' 

He's lying, and badly, but it's enough.

Sherlock takes a shaky breath and tries again.  'Inside my head is like Harrods, only it's not what I see, it's what I think.  Too much.  Too much of it all.  Sometimes...I'm me, and that's all right, sometimes it's even almost entirely fine, but right now I'm...sometimes you need to get away from me.  Don't argue, it's obvious, I'm too much for you.  Only now  _I_ 'm too much; for me, for you, for anyone.  Too fast.  I'm overclocking.'

_so many thoughts and none of them nice and in a great big heaving sweaty mass, horrible things and none of them at all useful or good, and Sherlock can see John_ thinking _again and if he_ dare _think the words 'dysphoric' or 'agitation' or 'racing thoughts'-_

'You can leave.  Please, I want you to, I didn't before but I do now.  I want you to stay another day, but I'll want that tomorrow, too, and if you keep staying then you'll hate me and I can't watch that, I can't, you need to get out before that happens.  You told me you would – not  _you_ , but it was still you, the you in my head.'

John rocks back on the balls of his feet, tightens his fingers on the sofa.  'The me in your head hates you, doesn't he?  God, what a bastard.  Anything I can do to shut him up?'

Sherlock screws up his face.  He's not crying, not really; there's grit from not sleeping in his eyes, and there is altogether too much  _light_.  He shakes his head.  'No.'

'There must be  _something_ ,' says John, and Sherlock wants to shake him, shake the infuriating calm voice out of him.

'Why won't you get it through your simple little brain?   _Nothing_  helps.  You'll try to talk me out of it, feed me tea and sympathetic nods, and you'll just feel worse at the end because it  _won't help_.'  He flings the words away like a wet dishrag.

'That's true,' muses John, 'But you forget that I'm a doctor.   I've killed people, and I've let them die, too.  I'm very good at taking solace in the thought that I tried.  And very bad at not trying.  Except antibiotics at the first sign of a cold, there I don't bother.  Will you let me try something?'

'What?'

'Tea.  Not sympathetic nods, you'll throw things at me.  A walk.'

'I hate  _you_  seeing me like this, I don't want people seeing me, I'm not dressed.'

'Well, we can get you dressed.  And no-one will see us except a cabbie, I promise.  Nowhere public.  It's locked at night, but I'm sure you can get us in somehow.'

'Where?'

'Highgate Cemetery.'

_________________________________

 

   
A shared shower, a cab ride, a wall scaled and ninety minutes later, the two are sitting just outside the Family Vault of Sir James Tyler. 

John is passing Sherlock slices of apple spread with peanut butter, in an attempt to make up for all the meals gone uneaten in the past week.  Sherlock is eating them because he has been ordered to, although he is very conscious that he shouldn't be enjoying them. This isn't hard, as they taste of nothing anyway - to be specific, crunchy watery nothing smeared with sticky cloying nothing - but he feels this is something it would be unkind to mention.

_It's not a bad graveyard_ , he thinks. 

The clear land where they're sitting is surrounded by encroaching centuries of growth and decay.  Headstones drowning in swelling, sprawling bushes, ivy writhing into names and epitaphs, physically eroding the signs of lives already forgotten.  Walk down, around the vaults, through the Egyptian Avenue, and the casual disarray fractures into a jumble of green and grey.  Pale dappled light straggles through the deciduous canopy, dripping and pooling on monuments so snared in vines, they could be crosses or angels or something else entirely.  The wood locks out all but the constant chatter of birds and the oceanic rustle of foliage, cocooning the cemetery away from the incessant rumble of the city.

_No_ , Sherlock thinks,  _not bad at all._ Peaceful.  Like going to sleep - no, not like going to sleep at all, but what going to sleep is supposedly like.  He wonders if anyone does really sleep like that, or if it's a myth perpetuated by the kind of people who are so unobservant, they may as well be sleeping even while they’re awake.  Perhaps it's quiet in their heads.  He doesn't sleep like that.  John certainly doesn't.  And neither, presumably, did Hamlet - which, he thinks triumphantly, should surely count for something.  It would be nice to be buried here, he thinks, in a place that doesn't smell of smoke and dirt, where the rain smells like rain and doesn’t taste of petrol, where there are no car horns or wailing sirens.  Entire families are interred here, not just in vaults but more often buried in the same grave, skeletons twisted together like frozen lace.  That wouldn't be so bad, everything being quiet, wrapped around John more closely than ever he could in life, hands inside each other's ribs.  John wouldn't mind that, not if it didn't hurt, and between the quiet and the being allowed to put his hands actually inside John’s chest, being dead (though not conscious and therefore not able to fully enjoy the privilege) would barely be an inconvenience at all-

'Hey,' says John.  'You.  Stop thinking.  Whatever you're thinking about - stop it.'

Sherlock startles.   Slowly, he manages to rewind and replay the last nine seconds.  Confusion, comprehension, confusion, disdain - and then loathing.

'I  _can't_ ,' he snarls.  'Don't be  _thick_.  I haven't slept in almost three days and I still can't stop thinking, so thank you so much for your professional medical opinion, but you're an idiot.  Does that sort of suggestion work for anyone at all, or merely your very stupidest patients?'

John blinks.  Looks at his hands, crinkles his eyes, looks sideways at Sherlock, half-laughs, shrugs.  'I...I guess that's fair.  That  _was_  thick.  Sorry.  I meant - doesn't matter, I'm sorry.  I -'

The tight pain behind Sherlock's eyes is expanding, rolling in, pushing out.  He avoids looking at the trees downhill; if he stares at their trunks for any length of time, he'll start to count them again, and he's no longer sure whether he can believe the shimmers he sees in the corners of his eyes.

'I'm sorry you're miserable, I'm sorry you’re…overclocking.  I wish you weren't.  That's what I meant to say.  I don't always say the right thing, and I feel useless.  Because you’re miserable, and I can't do anything to help, and I love you.'

Sherlock drops his head onto his steepled fingers, clenches them into claws, squeezes his eyes tightly shut.  'No.'

'Tough.  I love you.'

'No, shut up, just shut  _up_!  Over and over again, the same words, you just throw them in like punctuation, like "yours sincerely", over and over and over and they mean  _nothing_!  What do you _mean_ , it's not even a compliment, you love plenty of people who don't come close to deserving it.   It's just  _noise_.  You're just saying noise.  Don't talk like that to me, don't try and  _coddle_  me.  Go home if you're not going to say anything useful, I've got a headache.'

'Um.  Okay.'  John nods.  'Shut up for a minute, let me think.  I'm going to try again, and this time I promise not to tell you I love you.'

A minute passes, then two.

'Are you going to -?'

'Sherlock.  For.  The.  Love.  Of.  God.  I'm thinking.  Not all of us can talk in full paragraphs without rehearsing first.'

'"First" is redundant,' Sherlock mutters, 'As all rehearsal is by definition before the event in quest -'

' _Sherlock_.'

The shadow of the mausoleum opposite (Julius Beer, 1836-1880) stretches across the path as the sun begins to set. 

Ten minutes.

'I…I love that you're wearing that coat when it's the middle of summer, but you'll rush off to a crime scene in your pyjamas in December.  I love how you look completely ridiculous in my jacket, and you hate looking ridiculous, but you'll wear it anyway because it's mine.  I love that you make me scrub my hands when I get home because you hate the taste of hand sanitiser and hospitals on me, and I love that you've made up some ridiculous poetic nonsense about how I'm supposed to taste.  I love that you'll wash my hands when we're in the bath together.  I love how melodramatic you are when you sulk; I love that you're a grown adult who somehow manages to pull off a pout.  I love the way you look at me like I'm the only interesting live thing in the room.  I love that you play the violin like it's part of your own body, like it's a missing limb you regrew, I love that you play until you forget where and who you are, but sometimes, somehow, you're still playing for me.  I love that so many people don't realise you can play, really play, they think you just scrape at the strings, so when you play for me it feels like something secret and precious.  I love that you're not like anyone else in the world, and I love that you're just enough of an idiot to think that's the same as not being _anything_  like anyone else.  I…love how you're looking at me warily right now, like you can't believe what I'm saying, and you look like that whenever you get a compliment - even though you're somehow one of the most arrogant men on Earth at the same time.  I love that you're rude, 'cause you never give me a compliment you don't mean.  Like giving compliments is a secret, like playing your violin for only me.  I love that you think I'm completely mad, but never realised I might understand you, never thought there could be  a voice in  _my_  head who talks like you and hates  _me_.  Jesus.  I love that you said I can leave you, and never considered it might be the other way around.  I love your delusion that I'm some sort of hobbit, even though I'm far closer to average height than you are, thanks very much.  I love that you're looking at me like I'm a total nutter because you've got no idea what a hobbit is - and we’re fixing that, next film night.  I love that I have to translate pop culture for you, and I love that you're ten times as smart as me but sometimes, once in a bloody blue moon, you look at me like I'm brilliant, and I could skip food and live on that look for a week.  I love that I can get you to eat by accidentally-on-purpose cooking double portions, and I love that you write your name all over me when you think I'm asleep.  I love that I can veto anything on your Lists, and I love even more how much of them I don't even want to.'

Sherlock’s eyes have relaxed a fraction, the only part of his body not motionless.  John continues –

'That's what I mean, when I say "I love you."  Not just because you're brilliant, or beautiful - though, god, you are - but because I love you even when you can't be brilliant.  When you're ill, when you're stuck in your own head, when you're a pain in the arse, when you're rude, when you're nasty, when you're downright vicious.  Like you said - there isn't any part of you I don't want.  Even this.'

_Click_.

Sound slides away from his ears.  His vision blurs until the world is white, then turns very, very bright and very, very sharp.  The world breaks into tiny shattered fragments of pebble and leaf and a thread on his coat sleeve and two hairs tickling his left ear and the serif of the top arm of an 'E' on the mausoleum and the faint smell of lavender and the white mark on his right thumbnail and the acid burn on the base of his thumb and the rough of his coat on his arm and the root of the hair on his hand and the rough edge of crumbling mortar and the slam-thump of blood thundering through him.  But this is the wrong information, he wants to think about what in the future he will call The Speech but there's too much of it and he's overthinking it, he looks at it and it decays like an old painting exposed to light, crumbles into gravel like the world, into clauses and down, down to words cut white in the air, to syllables and phonemes and down, down below meaning to simple sound.  It's all vital information and needs to be examined all at once, all written too fast on his hard drive and he can't dismiss it and delete any of it before thorough analysis.  It's all marked ‘Urgent’ and the Voice doesn't know what to do, what to deal with first, what to scream at him for believing - and so, suddenly, it's not saying anything at all.

 

'I also love,' says John, with just a trace of smugness, 'That I can nick ideas from films you’d never watch to trick you into thinking I'm clever.'

‘What?'  Sherlock is absent, trying to pull the shards that remain of a recent and terribly important sentence out of his head, to reassemble it and figure out what all the sounds mean when put very close together.

'Never mind, I can't ever let you watch my guilty pleasure rom-com collection.  You'd realise all my best lines are stolen.'

‘That dreadful pun you made last month, about the waiter with the chess piece tattoos?  That was from a romantic comedy?   
Stolen?'

'Well.  Adapted.'

'Adapted.'

'...loosely.  Very.'

Sherlock frowns.  The sentence he's looking for, he can't find it, the pieces don't fit - aha.  There.

'Why do you have a me in your head that hates you?'

'Same reason you have a me in your head.'

'But you -'

John is looking at him with an oddly familiar expression.  It is, he suddenly realises, his own 'You're an idiot' expression, and it's deeply unsettling to see it on someone else’s face.

'Of  _course_  I have a Voice in my head that hates me,' says John.  'I’m a soldier and a doctor, yet I’m crippled and mental.  They’re not things that sit well together.'

'Psychosomatic.'

'Funnily enough, being mental does  _tend_  to be ‘all in your head,' yeah.  Doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.'

'The me in your head is an idiot if he thinks I hate you.  I forgot to eat for four days when you left.  I went around the flat and collected your hairs.'

'The me in your head is an idiot, ‘specially seeing as I never actually left.  That's the maddest thing you've ever thought, including that I might accept your severed arm as a bribe to take you back.'

Sherlock looks down at his arm, notices how the hairs all point in different directions, how some of them are straight and lie flat, how some are curved and straight up... 'You'd never displayed any interest in unattached limbs - although since none of the unattached limbs you've seen were ever mine, assuming you definitely weren't interested would have been a premature hypothesis.  But with all the data I had available, offering my arm was definitely madder.'

'Hm.  I suppose so.  Thinking I'd left you is definitely up there, though.'  John pulls the last apple out of the bag and begins to peel it, slowly, deliberately.  A spatter on the knife blade, and he looks up, sniffing.  'It's going to rain.'

'It smells like a storm, yes.'

'Could just be me you're smelling.  If I taste of storms, I must smell a bit like them too…'

'Oh, shut up.'

'Home?'

'A few minutes more.  We'll have a while yet before it starts to thunder.'

John picks up the last apple and the knife, carving a slash of white against red as the peel slides away in one long strip.  'Okay.  We can stay as long as you want - I've got an umbrella, anyway.' 

**( -Ella -Ella –Ella)**  echoes in Sherlock's head, and it's that wretched song that wouldn't stop playing all over London last year, the one with a range of about five notes and the infuriatingly slow beat, and he can feel the itch at the back of his mind that means the Voice won't be long coming back.  It's just a little  _too_  quiet in his head and the wind's a little  _too_  still in the long grass, and the storm won't be long in coming.  The hairs on his arms prickle up.

**(-Ella -Ella -Ella, hey)**  rises up again, and Sherlock shoves it out, down, replaces it with the first song he can think of, something rough and visceral about disease and danger.  ‘ _There’s nothing in my dreams, but some ugly memory_ ,’ he thinks, and feels green-black ivy at the edges of his mind again, tendrils reaching into the sulci, into the deep fissures between lobes, trying to pull his brain apart and into dust like another worn gravestone.  He shivers.

John looks over.  'Someone walk over your grave?'

Sherlock shakes his head.  ' _John loves me when I sulk_ ,' he chants silently.  ' _John loves me when I'm rude, and when I'm polite, and when I do things that he hates.  John never walked out on me, he worries I’ll walk out on him, which is ridiculous, because – no, stop that.  John loves how rarely I actually play in front of other people.  John doesn't even mind the worst things on the Lists, not when he knows he can say no.  John would, in all probability, let me put my hands inside his ribcage when we die, which should be at the same time and not very soon.  I occasionally make John feel something other than stupid, entirely by accident, and he loves that, too._

He pauses for a moment, imagining wrestling the Voice over a precipice, watching it fall down into the very darkest pits of his mind, seeing it viciously dashed on the rocks below him.  ‘ _And so_ ,' he calls triumphantly into the void, ' _Why don't you just.  Piss_.   _Off._ '  
 

The Voice grinds quietly, deep in his head, itching.  He thinks, throws  _‘Erase my feeling, one more time_ ' at it, and it snarls.  It won't be gone for long, but he might be able to sleep tonight.  The thought of sleep feels like a physical tug towards home, but that would require movement and a wall to be scaled and a taxi to be found, and these will seem like insurmountable obstacles until the storm breaks and he is wet enough to submit to being taken home. 

But for now he's reluctant to do anything, change anything at all that might upset this fragile equilibrium.  Anything that might tumble him down into the shrieking mist, falling with only the Voice for companionship.

Another raindrop.  Then another, a dark spatter against cream dust.  Another. 

'Home?'  John stands up, opening the umbrella. 

He shakes his head.  'Just a little longer.'

John sits down wordlessly, holding the umbrella over them both as the clouds rip open. 

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to betas/cheerleaders CrashCart9, ScritchesandTea, and to Wordstrings for permission and support - as well as generally being so goshdarnit amazing that her hiatus drove me to writing this.


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